In an open architecture test system, software needs to have access to vendor specifications for the list of vendor hardware module versions that are guaranteed to work with each version of the accompanying module software, for every vendor hardware module with which the user's particular system is configured, and for every different associated module software component for each such vendor hardware module. The system is then required to analyze this complex information efficiently to determine the choices for software components it should present to the user as candidates for the software content of the system.
Ideally, the presented choices for software components should comprise as large a set as possible, within the overall constraint that any complete set of software components the user picks from the given choices are guaranteed to work together, and work with the user's chosen hardware configuration. In the context of this problem, one method is to list compatible hardware versions for each software component, such as a comma-separated list of integral numbers, to represent the hardware version numbers (with range specifiers for denoting contiguous numbers). This method has a number of problems.
First, hardware version numbers are often large; requiring as many as 32 bits, where different bit-fields within the numbers may have different proprietary significance to the hardware vendor. If the vendor chooses to certify all versions with all possible values for a particular pattern of bits within the number as being compatible with a single software version, this may lead to: a) a non-contiguous sequence of version numbers, which cannot be efficiently represented through range specifiers; and/or b) a very large number of version numbers, yielding a very long list, which may be quite impractical for storage and/or processing purposes. Second, the method is quite restrictive, especially in the case of very frequent hardware product updates, which may call for frequent additions to the list, and consequently, a tedious and frequent process of regeneration of system profiles at a user's site to incorporate the additions. Therefore, there is a need for a compact representation of vendor hardware module versions in an open architecture test system for efficient field deployment.